Schismatrix plus Read Online Free

The tanks brimmed with oozing green brew: algae. The last agriculture left in the Zaibatsu was an oxygen farm. He swooped lower over the tanks. Gratefully, he breathed the enriched air. His aircraft's shadow flitted over a jungle of refinery pipes. As he looked down, he saw a second shadow behind him. Lindsay wheeled abruptly to his right.
    The shadow followed his movement with cybernetic precision. Lindsay pulled his craft into a steep climb and twisted in the seat to look behind him.
    When he finally spotted his pursuer, he was shocked to see it so close. Its splattered camouflage of dun and gray hid it perfectly against the interior sky of ruined land panels. It was a surveillance craft, a remotely controlled flying drone. It had flat, square wings and a noiseless rear propeller in a camouflaged exhaust cowling.
    A knobbed array of cylinders jutted from the robot aircraft's torso. The two tubes that pointed at him might be telephoto cameras. Or they might be x-ray lasers. Set to the right frequency, an x-ray laser could char the interior of a human body without leaving a mark on the skin. And x-ray beams were invisible.
    The thought filled him with fear and profound disgust. Worlds were frail places, holding precious air and warmth against the hostile nothingness of space. The safety of worlds was the universal basis of morality. Weapons were dangerous, and that made them vile. In this sundog world, only weapons could keep order, but he still felt a deep, instinctive outrage. Lindsay flew into a yellowish fog that roiled and bubbled near the Za-ibatsu's axis. When he emerged, the aircraft had vanished. He would never know when they were watching. At any moment, unseen fingers might close a switch, and he would fall.
    The violence of his feelings surprised him. His training had seeped away. There flashed behind his eyes the uncontrollable image of Vera Kelland, plunging downward, smashing to earth, her craft's bright wings crumpling on impact. . . .
    He turned south. Beyond the ruined panels he saw a broad ring of pure white, girdling the world. It abutted the Zaibatsu's southern wall. He glanced behind him. The northern wall was concave, crowded with abandoned factories and warehouses. The bare southern wall was sheer and vertical. It seemed to be made of bricks.
    The ground below it was a wide ring of blazingly clean, raked white rocks. Here and there among the sea of pebbles, enigmatically shaped boulders rose like dark islands.
    Lindsay swooped down for a closer look. A squat guardline of black weapons bunkers swiveled visibly, tracking him with delicate bluish muzzles. He was over the Sterilized Zone.
    He climbed upward rapidly.
    A hole loomed in the center of the southern wall. Surveillance craft swarmed like hornets in and around it. Microwave antennae bristled around its edges, trailing armored cables.
    He could not see through the hole. There was half a world beyond that wall, but sundogs were not allowed to glimpse it.
    Lindsay glided downward. The ultralight's wire struts sang with tension. To the north, on the second of the Zaibatsu's three land panels, he saw the work of sundogs. Refugees had stripped and demolished wide swaths of the industrial sector and erected crude airtight domes from the scrap. The domes ranged from small bubbles of inflated plastic, through multicolored caulked geodesies, to one enormous isolated hemisphere. Lindsay circled the largest dome closely. Black insulation foam covered its surface. Mottled lunar stone armored its lower rim. Unlike most of the other domes, it had no antennae or aerials.
    He recognized it. He'd known it would be here.
    Lindsay was afraid. He closed his eyes and called on his Shaper training, the ingrained strength of ten years of psychotechnic discipline. He felt his mind slide subtly into its second mode of consciousness. His posture altered, his movements were smoother, his heart beat faster. Confidence seeped into him, and he smiled. His mind felt sharper,